SIR – Your special report on the future of the car (April 20th) swerved away from tackling the biggest change that will come from automated automobiles: the end of personal car ownership. The implications for the car industry are profound. All of the accessories, including garages, that car ownership encourages will be unnecessary. No one will want to pimp a rented ride, and no one will care about a car’s horsepower or its looks. This will be great for the environment, but a disaster for the car industry as we know it.

Len EppMontreal

SIR – There could be some unsettling political consequences of driverless cars. The same technology that will turn commuting into a productive time will also offer greater means of control to illiberal governments or unaccountable individuals. How easy would it be for, say, the Chinese government to block driving to certain places? How easy would it be for an activist engineer in Silicon Valley (I’ve met a few) to impair a driverless road system to stop voters getting to the polls and sway the outcome of an election?

Guillaume GavilletSan Francisco

Good to GOCO

SIR – Your article on reforms to Britain’s defence-procurement process very rightly focused on how to attain efficiencies in defence spending at a time when public resources are under pressure (“To boldly GOCO”, April 13th). The stakes are high. If Britain wants to remain a significant force for good on the world stage we simply have to ensure our armed forces get the right equipment at the right time and for the right price. This does not happen at present.

Repeated reports from parliamentary watchdogs have highlighted the considerable waste of resources that is endemic in the system. It is time for a radical rethink that can align the necessary project-management skills with the right performance incentives in a single framework. This is precisely what the GOCO concept (government-owned but operated by a private contractor) can offer and why the British government would be well advised to pursue it.

There is also a good precedent we can build on. Several years ago the government established a GOCO to run the Atomic Weapons Establishment. It has done an excellent job in managing an enormous programme of change in a highly sensitive area. We know how to structure these kinds of arrangements. We need now to apply this experience to the defence-procurement function of the Ministry of Defence and in doing so, bring about the radical change in culture that will be necessary to fix what has been a continuing failure in public policy.

John HuttonSecretary of state for defence, 2008-09House of LordsLondon

SIR – As someone who had responsibility for this issue until last year and had ministerial oversight for the existing procurement body, Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S), I acknowledge that you are asking all the right questions—it is just that they all have answers. The government has been thinking about this for a long time now, too long in fact.

The system is broken. The defence-equipment budget has been balanced for the first time in living memory, but it won’t stay balanced without the higher levels of skills and the commercial freedoms to which your article referred. Crucially, it also needs a better, more commercial relationship between the armed services, the ministry and DE&S. A GOCO is the answer to your questions.

* SIR – You provided a fascinating insight into current public-service thinking. The problem is certainly as old as the Zuckerman report in the 1950s, and probably dates back to Samuel Pepys and beyond: the military establishes a requirement for equipment, the estimated cost is agreed by the executive and approved by Treasury and Parliament, and then the cost escalates forcing a choice between paying up and embarrassing cancellation. So why would a private contractor (SERCO, Bechtel, or another company) do the job better?

This is not just a question of managing complex programmes, but a matter of deciding priorities in the public interest. It is easy to state the necessary procedures: a thorough feasibility assessment and cost investigation before a project is approved, a refusal to allow later gold-plating beyond approved costs, and a robust procedure of stage reviews to check on cost escalation and decide on cutbacks or cancellation. These are public-service tasks requiring ministerial support and accountability, in the Department and the Treasury. Since project costs will spread many years ahead, they will not be controlled by an overall defence budget, but only by an effective finance function in Defence and Treasury insisting on proper appraisal.

It is not surprising that an agency with 16,500 staff in Bristol can’t “change the culture” to stand up to the military on its own, nor that Philip Hammond may want high-level business advice in tackling the problem (as Michael Heseltine, when he was defence secretary, brought in Peter Levene).

A change in culture has to come from the top supported by an effective public-service finance function. It is hard to see how Serco could help.

SIR – One of the letters you ran on Thatcherism (April 27th) credited Isaiah Berlin with the quote “Freedom for the pike is death to the minnows.” Actually, it was R.H. Tawney who first wrote that line, in his book “Equality”. Berlin repeated the phrase in his “Two Concepts of Liberty”, but in some editions Tawney is not footnoted. Sir Isaiah later came up with his own animal-like analogy on individual freedom: “Total liberty for the wolves is death to the lambs.”

Michael RawlinsHong Kong

Building trust

SIR – Your article on electronic trading concluded with a high-frequency trader saying we should trust his business to get it right in the same way we trust architects and developers to get it right when they design a building (“Dutch fleet”, April 20th). But we don’t just simply trust architects and builders. We regulate every aspect of a building’s construction, with regular and intrusive inspections for the structure’s entire lifetime.

Violators face civil and criminal penalties. Anyone harmed has recourse against the owners, builders and architects. If this is the regulatory model the high-frequency trading industry wants, critics will be delighted to agree. In light of the “flash crash” in New York in May 2010, and an apparent flash crash in Germany recently, there is little room for trust. We need smart regulation.

R.T. LeuchtkaferNew York

Farming today in Nigeria
* SIR – You painted a picture of a deprived commercial-farming sector in the Nigerian economy (“Nothing like chicken feed”, April 13th). The issues raised included dismal yields due to poor-quality seed and fertiliser, the unavailability of research facilities, and poor access to credit.

I acknowledge that some of those problems exist, but wish to point out agriculture has undergone a significant transformation in recent years. For example, private-sector seed and fertiliser companies can now sell directly to farmers, reducing or possibly eliminating corruption in the system. Also there has been an increase in farmed acreage and a 300% increase in bank lending to farmers in the past four years. The Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk-Sharing System for Agricultural Lending, founded in 2011, has helped farmers access loans at single-digit interest rates compared to the 25% for non-agricultural loans.

Contrary to the claims made in the article, crop yields have improved over the years with the availability of new breed seeds. One example is cassava, where the new variants can now produce 25 tons a hectare compared with the ten tons produced by the old breeds.

The agricultural sector in Nigeria is growing and is set to continue into the foreseeable future due to the growing involvement of private ownership.

Bismarck RewaneLagos* SIR – Consider this missing factoid from your otherwise rich piece on impoverished Nigeria (“Lurching ahead”, April 13th): this country without reliable infrastructure is also where the take-home annual salary of the typical senator is more than the combined salaries of the president and vice-president of the United States. It is formidable for any reform to gain traction when systemic corruption runs this wild.

Muyiwa OnigbogiWest Orange, New Jersey

North Korean puppets

SIR – Banyan accepted the common view that China is acting as a reluctant moderating influence over North Korea’s insane truculence (April 13th). This is based solely on the unsupported assertion that the Chinese behemoth fears that the collapse of its smaller neighbour will somehow overwhelm its resources. An alternative likelihood is that China is instead acting as the instigator, not the moderator, of this manufactured “crisis”, and that North Korea is China’s pit bull snarling at America on its command.

China benefits from the same geopolitical picture as always: putting America on the defensive, forcing concessions, distracting attention from China’s economic rise, and getting America to expend effort and wealth to counter yet another imaginary threat.

P.L. BeinRed Bank, New Jersey

Geographic perspectives

SIR – Why does The Economist insist on referring to substantially large countries as “tiny”? This has happened recently with Cyprus (“Slow, slow, quick”, March 16th) and Latvia (“Baltic ambition”, April 20th). Cyprus is one of the larger islands in the Mediterranean, bigger than either Corsica or Crete. It is one-third larger than Prince Edward Island and equal in size to Long Island.

Latvia is larger than Nova Scotia, New Jersey, Switzerland or Denmark and only slightly smaller than Ireland. Look at a map. Enough of this “tiny”.

Kevin HarringtonRetired geography teacherOrangeville, Canada

Not prudish in Pennsylvania

SIR – I was relieved to read that feminists are forcing a crack down on pornography in Iceland (“Naked ambition”, April 20th). From the heart of Amish country in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, my mother-in-law reports that the book most frequently borrowed from her retirement-home library is “Fifty Shades of Grey” (the large-print edition).